Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  And there were other blunders. In a speech in the north Georgia mountain town of Chatsworth, Rivers allegedly told a crowd that he had always been opposed to mixing of the races, and “that is one reason I came to the mountains for my wife.”22 Rivers might as well have said that whites living in the flatlands downstate were mongrels. Hardman supporters hammered Rivers with that remark. In later campaigns, Rivers would be much more guarded in his statements on race, suspiciously guarded given his deep ties to the Klan.

  Hoover was elected president, and Rivers lost the Democratic primary for governor in 1928. He would lose again two years later in 1930 to Richard B. Russell Jr. Meanwhile, the power and prestige of the Klan had begun to decline, partly because of the sex scandals that so defied the Invisible Empire’s moral creed and partly because of the coming of the Great Depression, which left no money for Klan dues, robes, or other such expenses.

  In the early 1920s, the Klan could get a man elected governor in Georgia and in many other states in the nation. Those days were quickly coming to an end. But the great titan, Ed Rivers, would not let the Klan go, the Klan of acid brandings and of killing men in sugarcane crushers. Rivers clung to it long after it began to fade. The imperial wizard, Hiram Wesley Evans, presided over the crumbling empire, and he remained a friend of Rivers’s and a financial contributor to his campaigns.

  Ed Rivers was not finished with politics, and the Klan was not finished with Ed Rivers.

  3

  Laid to Rest

  James Monroe Williams was a man who had pulled himself out of the Georgia dirt. By 1931, the year after Ed Rivers lost his second race for governor, Williams was a respected Methodist minister in the south Georgia town of Rochelle. He was a man of the Gospel.

  Williams, a white man, was born in Pulaski County, Georgia, a few miles from the town of Hawkinsville, and spent his entire childhood on a farm. At an early age, he learned to plow behind a mule. Backbreaking work was all he knew. “I never missed a year plowing from the time I was 10 until I was 26-years-old,” he would later say. “The little education I have, I have gotten since I was a married grown man.”1

  He married at age nineteen. Six children—four girls and two boys—followed. His wife died of the flu in 1918, exactly eleven years and one month after their marriage. He was left with six mouths to feed, and he fed them, through sheer will and grueling work on the farm. He did his best to “mother those children who were constantly crying for a mother,” he recalled. In February 1919, all six children were sick at the same time, four with the flu and two with pneumonia. All six lived in one room of the farmhouse. They were saved by the providence of God, Williams said, but he knew he had to make a change if they were to survive. So he sent three of the six children to live with relatives.

  He was already preaching by then, and that fall during a revival meeting in Valdosta he met the woman who would become his second wife. She was the principal of a school, and during that revival meeting she professed Christ as her savior. Williams baptized her and then a few months later, on January 10, 1920, married her. He was assigned a church in the tiny town of Statenville, Georgia. There he and his new wife lived with five of Williams’s six children.

  “The Lord and his providence has blessed me with two of as good women for wives as has ever lived,” Williams said.

  With his new wife, he had five more children, four of whom lived. Even more mouths to feed. Luckily, as his family grew, so did his spiritual flock.

  At forty-three years old and living in the town of Rochelle, he wore a suit and tie to work. His rough hands were no longer stained by dirt. At five feet eleven inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, with his dark hair closely cropped and razor cut on the sides, he had the appearance of a minister, a stocky, rough-hewn, square-jawed pastor, a dirt farmer turned preacher.

  By 1931 the Great Depression was on, and very few people had any money left. Even the church was slow in paying Williams his $1,800 annual salary. Williams could always whip his congregants into a spiritual frenzy, convince them to accept Jesus. That was his God-given talent and was an easy thing to do, and that was easier now that the times were so desperate. The congregants would always have the preacher over for a good fried chicken dinner after church. The shortfall was in the offering plate, the cold hard cash that any church needed to survive.

  He now had five churches scattered throughout south Georgia, and still he struggled to make ends meet with so many children to support, the youngest of them only three months old. He drove a two-year-old Dodge across bumpy south Georgia roads, going from church to church. He wanted a new car, one that would make a better impression on the congregants, whom he was trying to inspire with hope, hope that the Lord would take care of them if they only took care of themselves, if only they would keep the faith.

  On May 16, 1931, Williams drove from Rochelle to Albany, about forty miles away, and pulled into the J. W. Bush Motor Company. There sat a shiny new Dodge four-door sedan, with leather upholstery, black with a red stripe. That was an automobile that would make a preacher proud.2

  The price tag was $1,015. A trade-in of his Dodge and an old burned-out Ford sedan he had sitting at the house left Williams owing $600. He signed a note for that amount, due on September 16, 1931, exactly four months away. The seller would keep the title until the loan was repaid. The car had Goodyear all-weather tires on it, but Williams already had a set of Fisk Deluxe tires at the house. He put those on and sold the Goodyears back to the dealer. He proudly sped off the lot in that new car.

  There was, however, the matter of the $600 note, a third of the preacher’s annual salary. Williams had a plan for that. A brand-new car had value, loan value. Williams knew how a man could leverage a new car, particularly if the man was a man of the Gospel. Even if he didn’t have the title, he knew how to borrow money on that new car.

  Williams drove the new Dodge to Macon and stopped at the loan company of B. H. Fincher. Fincher loaned Williams $250 on his brand-new 1931 Dodge.

  “When he came to get this loan, I asked him if the car was paid for, and he said that it was,” Fincher said. “I asked him where he bought it and he said he bought it in Atlanta. I think he exhibited to me a bill of sales. I am not certain of that but I think he did.”3

  Then Williams went to Consolidated Loan and Finance in Macon for another loan on the car, this one for $300. He brought with him a document that purported to be a statement from the local clerk of court stating that there were no liens on the car. And then there was the Southern Finance Corporation in Augusta—a $360 loan. Again, Williams told the company no money was owed on the car. Now he had real money. And he could do something with that—turn it into even more money, with plenty of time to pay off all the notes when they came due. There was real potential in cotton futures. They were risky, yes. But the upside was unlimited. And cotton was way down. Prices had to come up. They just had to.

  Williams went to E. H. Bell, a cotton broker at Stewart Brothers in Macon, and on June 6 purchased a futures contract for one hundred bales of New Orleans cotton, October delivery. He purchased the contracts on margin—making a small down payment and borrowing the remainder from the broker. That meant that he stood to make great gains if cotton went up, but he could lose all his investment and more if it went down. It went down. On June 9, Williams sold the contract at a loss.

  “$1,600 in losses, if you count my commission,” Bell said.4

  Williams owed the cotton broker $1,600, but he did not cover all the losses. The account remained $85.99 negative. On June 25, the broker closed the account.

  Williams also ran up losses at another cotton broker in Macon, O. H. Levy. Trying to cover it, he bounced a $500 check to Levy on July 14.

  This was not working out like the preacher had planned. He owed cotton brokers and he owed three different loan companies on the car, plus the original $600 note due in September. Checks were bouncing. The loans were coming due soon, and lenders would take the car if he didn’t pay them. And he
had five churches. Five churches and no car? He also faced potential criminal charges for fraud and lawsuits for triple borrowing on the car. Also, the church frowned on preachers investing in the futures market. Many considered it gambling. At the very least, Williams could be defrocked if word leaked out about that.

  With his finances imploding all around him, Williams made a very strange decision. He decided that once the summer revival season was over, he’d take a thousand-mile road trip to Brooklyn, New York, to visit his twenty-year-old son Grady, who was in the Navy stationed on a ship that was anchored there.

  Grady had been somewhat of a black sheep in the preacher’s family, joining the Navy three years earlier after running into “a little trouble in school.” Now Grady was married and had a baby. Williams had never met his daughter-in-law, who lived in Maine, or seen the baby. Grady had been sick recently—some kind of operation. Williams wanted to see the boy. He planned to drive the new car up there to Brooklyn to see his son, and he would also stop in North Carolina to visit a Methodist bishop.

  “I had been working hard through the summer and I was pretty tired from my work and I was seeking a transfer into the Carolina conference,” Williams said.5

  That was a long drive for a man on those lonely roads by himself. He asked one of his parishioners in Rochelle, W. T. Standard, if he could borrow his pistol, a .38-caliber “lemon squeezer” Smith & Wesson, for protection. Of course, said Standard.

  On the Monday after the third Sunday in July, after the summer preaching, the reaching for souls, was over, Williams rolled out of Rochelle, headed for North Carolina and Brooklyn, leaving behind for now the financial mess that the summer had devolved into, enjoying for now the new Dodge.

  He got to Charlotte but the bishop was not there, so he kept going to Brooklyn, and on July 22 he drove right up to the dock where Grady’s ship was anchored. It was a good reunion with Grady, who was a pharmacist’s mate third class.

  Williams wanted Grady to come back home for a visit to Rochelle, but Grady had no leave time left. Williams offered to talk to his commanding officer. If need be, they could use the excuse that Grady’s sister Ethel was very sick. So they met with Lieutenant Charles Ramsbell, executive officer of the ship.

  “His father told me he had come all the way from Georgia to get his boy,” said Ramsbell. The officer told Williams that Grady had no leave left—only under a medical emergency could he receive leave.6

  As a matter of fact, there was an emergency, the preacher said. Grady’s sister was sick.

  How sick?

  “The father said he didn’t believe that the boy would see the lady again unless he was able to get this leave,” said Ramsbell. “The boy had little to say. He was a very quiet-spoken boy anyway. I was very much impressed with the father and granted [Grady] 15 days’ emergency leave.” Ramsbell also stressed to Williams that Grady had no money for the return trip and that it would be up to Williams to cover that.7

  Williams had lied to the officer about his daughter’s illness. Ethel was sick, suffering from a chronic kidney condition; and she’d had a near nervous breakdown at Berry College in north Georgia, a college that allowed poor students to attend for free, in exchange for work. She’d had to leave Berry, but she was better now, not near death, and Williams hoped she would return to college for the fall semester.

  It was a successful lie, and Williams and Grady headed south to Rochelle in the new Dodge. Back home, they spent a pleasant week together, the son traveling with his father on the church circuit. At one service, Williams made a proposition, calling for church members to accept Jesus. Grady responded.

  “He came up and took me by the hand, stood there trembling, with the tears dropping off his face,” Williams recalled. “He said, ‘Daddy, I never heard a sermon that did me as much good as your sermon tonight.’ Well certainly I appreciated those words from Grady.”8

  The days passed quickly, and it wasn’t long before it was time to take Ethel back to Berry College, an eight-hour drive from Rochelle. Grady said he would go along and then hop a bus in Atlanta for New York. They dropped off Ethel on August 3, and Grady and Williams drove to Atlanta, spending the night in a $1-per-night cabin in a tourist camp about seven miles south of the city. The next morning, Williams later claimed, they drove to downtown Atlanta and Williams dropped Grady off near the bus station. Grady promised to return home in November after his enlistment in the Navy was over.

  Grady never made it onto that bus.

  At six o’clock the next morning, August 5, Grady’s body was discovered near Lombard’s gristmill in Richmond County, 9 miles south of Augusta, 175 miles from Rochelle, and more than 100 miles from Atlanta. Grady was lying on his back, with two pistol wounds, one to his left temple, the other in his chest. His coat was folded carefully over his stomach, and his left hand was on top of the coat.

  “The boy was neatly dressed, was rather young looking, tall, and I saw that he was clean,” recalled Mrs. R. H. Lombard, who lived nearby. “His clothes were clean. He had on a white shirt which was practically immaculate.

  “His coat was folded very carefully and smoothly and laid on top of his body. It looked at first as though he were holding his coat. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up. His collar was open slightly at the neck, no hat anywhere around and his shoes were unlaced, both of them, and his left shoe was turned at the heel as though it had been pushed on by someone and left with the heel partly turned in and the socks which were apparently too long for him were pulled out, the heels up over the edges of the shoes.

  “There was no blood on the shirt, not a drop anywhere. The only blood that was visible was on the ground. He had brown eyes—his teeth were apparently clean. There were bruises on the right wrist. His shoes were perfectly clean. He had rubber heels with the little holes in them and there was not one grain of gravel in those holes.”9

  There was no sign of a struggle. Yet there were tire tracks and shoe tracks still visible even though it had rained the night before. In Grady’s coat pocket was an envelope that had been addressed to his father, “Rev. J. M. Williams, Rochelle, Ga.”

  At about 9:30 a.m. a coroner’s physician examined Grady’s body. Rigor mortis, the stiffening of the corpse, had just begun to set in, indicating that he had been dead from four to eight hours. There was no sign of food or whiskey in Grady’s stomach, the physician said.

  Back in Rochelle, Williams at 10 a.m. fired off a telegram to Grady’s ship:

  R.G. WILLIAMS DUE TO ARRIVE TOMORROW 8 PM. SIGNED. J.M. WILLIAMS.

  The ship’s executive officer, Ramsbell, was puzzled as to why Williams had sent the telegram. After all, Grady was not yet late returning to the ship.

  “We don’t get telegrams of notification of sailors returning to the ship after leave as a rule unless a man is over leave and needs an extension of time,” Ramsbell recalled. “If a man is running on time, it is very unusual to hear from him.”10

  When a neighbor who had been contacted by the Richmond County Sheriff’s Department walked over to the church parsonage and told Williams that Grady’s body had been found, the minister immediately speculated that his son had been robbed. After all, he had $125 on him when Williams left him at the bus in Atlanta, the preacher said.

  Williams seemed to know, somehow, that no money had been found on Grady’s body, even though the police had not mentioned that yet. Williams had no way of knowing at that time whether any money was found on Grady’s body or not.

  At 11 a.m. on August 5, Williams sent another telegram to the ship:

  JUST RECEIVED MESSAGE R. G. WILLIAMS FOUND DEAD NEAR AUGUSTA, GA. WIRE INFORMATION ON DISPOSITION OF BODY.

  After learning of Grady’s death, Williams then drove to Augusta, identified Grady’s body, and met with police. He spent the night at the funeral home, sitting next to his son’s corpse, and the next day, August 6, he left for Rochelle to perform a wedding at 4 p.m. He arrived thirty minutes late for the ceremony. Investigators found it odd that he
would rush back home to perform a wedding, not remaining in Augusta to help police find the killer. It also seemed odd that a grieving father would have the presence of mind to perform a wedding only a few hours after learning of his son’s death.

  Back in Rochelle, neighbors and friends said Williams was agitated by the questions police had asked in Augusta. They were making comments the preacher didn’t like, insinuating that Grady’s body had been gently placed at the crime scene, the coat folded over his chest, by someone who “had some feeling for him.”

  He didn’t like those kinds of aspersions at all. Were the investigators trying to imply that he had killed his own son? He paced nervously.

  “He said he was nervous as he was in his life, and that when his first wife died he had a nervous breakdown then and he felt like he was going to have one now,” said a neighbor, Mrs. W. D. Hawkes, wife of the local school superintendent.

  Meanwhile, Williams almost immediately started asking questions about Grady’s life insurance.

  Grady had $7,500 worth of insurance, one policy for $2,500 and another for $5,000. Williams had been the beneficiary of both policies, but Grady had tried recently to put his wife’s name on the larger one. Williams asked men around Rochelle with experience in the insurance business about the process for changing beneficiaries and whether Grady had followed proper procedure. If not, would he, Williams, still be the beneficiary?

  The Navy launched an inquiry into Grady’s death, as did Richmond County. All signs quickly pointed toward Williams, the father, the Methodist minister, the man of God.

  As investigators interviewed Williams at the church parsonage in Rochelle, one of them slipped out to examine the tires on his new Dodge. The tire tracks in the field where Grady’s body was discovered did indeed match the tires on the Dodge. The footprint in the field matched Williams’s shoe size.